>Thanks for the response Ed. With the set memowidth command the value of 1024 would work fine, and that is what i thought... and did... expecting it to report the correct number of lines using MEMLINES, but it does not. There are 19646 lines in the memo field, but when i SET MEMOWIDTH TO 1024 and then look at the value of memlines() and it reports 2479, i tried the value you suggested 8192 and memlines() says 303. So, what i thought was happening isn't, i expected it to give me the number of lines in the memo field. If if set memowidth to a smaller number, like 150 i get close... 19092, but "close" isn't what i need! Is there some other setting I'm missing? Help wasn't very helpful (surprise).
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>Thanks for the info on the low level stuff too, I'll look into some of that as well.
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>This has been frustrating because it is another case of where I read the docs about something, *think* I get it, and it doesn't work the way I expect... maybe I should take a hint! ha ha

The first thing I'd check is to see if the file was written with standard line termination; as an example, you might find linefeeds (CHR(10)) alone coming from some non-PC platforms (like Unix boxes). If you read it into a memo field, you might want to try using OCCURS() to see how many CR/LF pairs are found, something like:

? OCCURS(CHR(13)+CHR(10),mMemoField)

Then check for CHR(13) alone, CHR(10) alone, and some of the other strange things like form feeds (CHR(14)) that might be getting inserted from some non PC platforms.